Out of Gas

by Radon088

According to Murphy's Law, "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong," and nothing can describe it more then Rachel Evans, experienced Pilot and horrible decision maker. Getting crushed by debts and hoping to flee, she starts a voyage to the other side of the galaxy. However Murphy strikes again and soon strands her beyond hope of rescue on a new world.

I own no rights to Elite. You could sue me... but all you could get is this cell phone.

Out of Gas

/Frame Shift Drive charging.../

Rachel Evans yawned as she shrugged her harness back onto her shoulders. Ahead of her ships vanished into hyperspace in flash after flash. She was one of the last in line so she would have to wait as over a hundred ships departed. She stretched as well as being strapped into a seat allowed and tried not to think of how bad she stank. Over a month in space with bathing limited to only once a week due to rationed water would have that effect.

Bored, Rachel reached for a slip of folded up paper, an expensive novelty in this day and age, intent on reminding herself why a one way push across the entire galaxy was a good idea.

"OPPORTUNITIES AWAIT"

The phrase was emblazoned on the front of the little pamphlet proudly, like it held all the answers she could ever want. Turning the page, the text described a vast untapped frontier where anyone could become incredibly rich. A wild interstellar wilderness where she could make her own rules. A fresh new start hundreds of thousands of light years away from the burdens of the old territory. Away from all the politics, the war, and the debts...

Rachel sighed and reclined her seat as far back as it would allow and propped her feet up on the dash, causing the sensor hologram to fizz and distort around her feet. She pushed the thought of how far in the red her credit account was out of her head in favor of dreams of riches, fancy food, and being an important person for once.

Almost two hours later it was finally her turn to jump. With another bone weary yawn she pushed the throttle forward and in a flash Rachel was surrounded with the shadowy tunnel of hyperspace as what sounded like the broken souls of the damned screamed at her from far away. She shook her head as the spooky noises sent little shivers up her spine and focused on the swirling lights out of the front window.

"Any second now." She whispered to herself.

/WARNING FUEL LEVELS CRITICAL/

The words flashed in bright red on her screen and her eyes immediately went to the little meter on the right of the dash... and watched the numbers tick down to zero.

There was a flash and a lurch as her Cobra dropped out of hyperspace at the first gravity well she hit. The star was a pale, pleasant yellow but no matter how nice it looked it didn't stop her from being utterly screwed.

"No! No please! Come on!" Rachel writhed in her seat as the gravity of her situation came down on her. The sinking feeling in her stomach was complemented by the sudden hyperventilation as her panic attack reached full swing. "Why!?" She sobbed, tears running down her cheeks as she struggled desperately against her harness. She wanted to bash her head into a bulkhead. It would be better than turning into putrid jerky as her corpse slowly dried out from the heat of the star.

She should have checked it! One glance was all it would have taken! But no! She just had to have been so complacent in the routine! So used to every set of jumps being the same! Being exhausted probably didn't help either. Rachel slowly came to her senses as her breathing slowed and she finally felt how much her throat hurt from screaming so much. She started to sob uncontrollably as her body went limp in her harness and her anger bled into despair.

After nearly an hour of crying Rachel finally calmed down enough to try to at least asses the situation. Her fingers went from control to control checking for radio signals, activating her distress beacon, and trying to spot any planets in the system. Her eyes went to her equipment list on the right, fixating on the empty equipment slot. One meant for a fuel scoop... She shivered in anger as she recalled how hard she had tried to get just a few more credits before the deadline. She was only a few dozen credits short but the dealer had been a major creep that had seen her credit score and expected certain favors she wasn't willing to give to make up the deficit.

She sighed and turned her eyes back to the sensors. As expected she couldn't detect any artificial satellites but there were several planets in the system. Her limited equipment could only pick up the general location and mass, none of the fine details more advanced equipment could have given her.

After several hours of complicated math she could barely remember only one planet looked to be anywhere near the habitable zone. Rachel quickly locked it in as her destination and activated her frame shift drive. She swallowed a lump in her throat. The ship had just shy of two hours of flight time left as long as she didn't do something stupid, but if the planet didn't turn out to be a one in a million garden world she would starve to death long before anyone found her. Of course, she reminded herself, she could starve to death even if the planet was habitable, too. She'd just be in a different spot in the system when she did.

The planet rapidly grew in the glass of the canopy and Rachel let out a sigh of relief when she spotted the greens covering several large areas. One continent in particular caught her attention, it was almost half covered in ice but a sizable green area was bordered by what looked like an equal sized desert. The planet looked Earth-like. Or it looked like what an Earth-like planet should look like, she hadn't ever actually seen Earth. There was a small, almost nonexistent chance that the planet would support an ecosystem that she was chemically compatible with. Her other option was to wait in orbit and wait for someone to home in on her distress signal.

Only there wasn't anyone in the system to hear it. There wouldn't be for years to come, at best.

Years she didn't have.

"Planet it is, then."

Her Cobra shuddered as she entered the atmosphere, rapidly losing altitude until she was flying low over bright, grassy plains. Was it actually grass? It was short and green and waved in the wind. It looked like some of the luxury resort adverts she saw around some of the stations, and in the distance there were larger things that were also tall and green. Trees? Probably trees. As she cruised, she spotted a plume of black smoke rising to the east. Curious she steered in that direction hoping whatever it was wouldn't be a problem for her once she picked a landing spot. As she neared it she spotted obvious signs of human habitation, small stone buildings and a canal that led into a bay filled with small boats.

"Yes! Oh my god, I have got to be the luckiest person in the entire galaxy!" Rachel gushed as she made a turn to circle the town. Wanting to get a closer look she flipped her ship upside down and looked up through the canopy. After a moment cruising just above roof level she spotted several figures on the ground running here and there, bits of their clothing glinting in the sunlight. On closer inspection they looked like they were done up in full-on military hardsuits, but obviously not the ceramic and carbon that most were made of based on the metallic shine. The visible weapons she could see were obviously not firearms, mostly long poles and... was that a sword? Like an actual, real life sword? She'd heard that some of the Imperial officers carried around swords as a mark of rank, and she knew they had them all over their iconography, but no one actually used swords in battle. No one.

They couldn't have been official Imperial soldiers. They didn't have… anything. It was something like a dozen people, not one in actual imperial combat gear. No vehicle support, no air support, there weren't even any man made structures in orbit. Rachel didn't really track politics, but the Empire was one of the largest powers in the galaxy. They stomped all over the place with pretty much all the hardware they could get if the N-VODs were true. The people below her weren't even brandishing pistols. Imperial troops would have also challenged her by now, a flight of Eagles at least, but half the people below seemed more interested in putting out fires with buckets of water or trying to stab each other with sticks than challenging her landing.

Pulling her ship into another lazy curve she eased over one of the wide open areas and gently touched down. As she was getting up from her seat she could see people running away in a panic from both her landing place and the people in the hardsuits. A woman in a long skirt tripped in the middle of the cobbled street and in a flash the armored men had surrounded her. Rachel watched with widening eyes as the cloth hood the woman wore was torn back to reveal bluish skin and sea green hair. The armored man shouted something Rachel couldn't hear before stabbing the strange woman in the stomach. How could someone just stab someone else to death in the street? She had seen people get into a gunfight over silly things in bars and more than her fair share of death in fiery explosions in the silence of space but… to just be hacked into ribbons with a sharp object? The blue woman screamed as the armored man roughly pulled his sword from her guts and lifted it high over his head to the cheers and jeers of the band of his fellows that surrounded the scene. Rachel watched with silent horror as he plunged his sword down again and completed the bloody murder. The woman's final scream shook Rachel out of her staring and with an angry glare at the armored man she activated one of her forward weapons. She didn't know exactly what made her so angry, the senseless killing or doing it in a place she could see. The pulse laser slid out of its housing on its short robotic arm with a visual pop-up warning about weapon use while landed that was ignored completely.

The armored man turned at the sound, having somehow missed her landing spot and went wide eyed as an orange beam of light slashed through his merry band of bandits. Bodies popped and sizzled as the liquid they contained flashed into steam and burst. He ducked as the beam scythed its way through his men and was only barely spared their fate as he managed to scramble behind a house. Rachel cursed her shitty aiming as the laser blasts missed the one man she was trying to aim for. Weren't these supposed to aim for her? That was the entire reason she had sprung for turrets in the first place!

.XXX.

Hours passed before anything else happened. Hours spent pointedly not looking out of the front window at the gory scene she had created. Rachel tapped away at the screen of a tablet computer as it calculated the atmospherics of this planet but a faint metallic clatter of a rock bouncing off the hull had her looking up to see a crowd of blue skinned people just outside. Rachel froze as she took in their appearance, they looked like the woman who had died with varying shades of blue skin and greenish hair.

Now that she could see them so much closer it was a lot easier to see their faces, big uniformly ruby eyes stared at her while little fins that seemed to serve as ears twitched this way and that. Before when it was only the one woman with blue skin it was possible that she had just been some random splicer or BME but now with what looked like half the village standing outside she had begun to think the unthinkable.

She jerked away from the window with a gasp causing the crowd to stir as they pointed and shouted. A few younger ones rushed forward and climbed up the sides of the ship to press their faces up against the glass only to be suddenly pulled back by older aliens, probably parents or older siblings. Rachel backed away down the short hallway that led down the spine of her ship, ducking into the tiny bunk that thankfully hid her from sight.

She curled up on the bed and listened to the clunks and thumps as the aliens did something but she was too frightened to look. After a few hours the noise faded and she risked a glance around. The blue skinned people who had been crowding around her ship were gone, the corpses in the street were gone and only dark stains from blood and the fires remained. She slowly returned to the cockpit, glancing around for any more signs of the aliens. When she found none she quickly strapped herself into her seat and started to prep for takeoff, there was no way she was going to just sit in the middle of some kind of alien town. When she reached for the controls to start up the lift-off sequence a large orange warning flashed over the sensor hologram.

/FUEL LEVELS CRITICAL/

/UNABLE TO INITIALIZE THRUSTERS/

Rachel stared at the warning, stunned. It had been just a few hours and already her ship was totally out of gas. Was there a leak? There had to be a leak, there was nothing else it could be.

With a long suffering sigh Rachel collapsed back into her seat and hung her head.

"Could this get any worse?"

.XXX.

Day 2

Rachel sighed as she twisted the tool in her hand around and finally popped free the busted fuel line that had been the source of all her troubles. This little cheapo part, one that she had a few hundred replacements for in the cargo hold had stranded her in the middle of nowhere surrounded by aliens.

With another long sigh she replaced the line and crawled out of the tiny space she had jammed herself into. Pulling herself to her feet and snapping the deck plate back into place she flipped a few holographic switches and checked the fuel level. Rachel grimaced as the system returned a grand total of one hour of main power remaining. The hydrogen fuel the ship ran on was completely gone and the fusion reactor was burning the last of it.

Flopping down in the pilot's seat Rachel sighed again and racked her brain to come up with ideas on how to at least get some more hydrogen.

"Could set up an electrolyzer." She muttered to herself. "Plenty of water outside and there's some solar panels in the cargo bay." The only problem with that was... She leaned forward to look at the little pile of stones, food and a lantern that the blue skinned people had set up just far enough from the foot of her ship that she could still see it.

The aliens had taken to leaving little bits of food and things sometime in the night. Were they trying to tempt her out? Did they really expect her to fall for such an obvious ploy? Those little rolls did look delicious...

Rachel violently shook her head, opened up a ration bar and chomped down on the hard little brick of sawdust almost angrily. She had really really wanted to spring for some decent food to take on her journey but once again her perpetually in the red credit account forced her to go with the cheapest option available.

With a long suffering sigh she tossed the wrapper from her dinner onto the floor and looked out at the little village. A village full of aliens. The houses were mostly dark with only a few of the larger ones showing any light from the windows. She looked back to the timer that held the estimated time till the fusion reactor would run out of fuel and watched the numbers tick down. If she didn't at least get the solar panels out of the hold before the power was gone then she'd be forever stuck. There was no possible way to operate the unloading mechanisms without power. With another sigh she activated the ship's UI and chased down the commands to jettison cargo while landed on a planet's surface.

"No choice I guess."

The machinery clunked and whirred and Rachel winced at the racket and hoped dearly she hadn't woken any of the alien people. The last thing she needed was...

A whole host of awful ideas ran through her mind, everything from being dragged away to be lynched to things that wouldn't be out of place in some dirty web vid.

Rachel shivered and shook her head to clear away the images. She could only hope the aliens would be the kind, civilized sort. The less said of the dark corner of her mind that thought up being some kind of female Version of James T Kirk the better.

With another shudder for good measure she stood and made her way to the tiny airlock that separated her nice, safe, comfor- ok not really that comfortable ship from the outside. The totally unknown outside that had aliens and who knows what else.

She jumped away from the door as the sheer weight of that idea settled in. She didn't want to go outside, didn't want to be the one to brave whatever strange dangers the planet outside held...

But since when had life ever given her much choice about anything?

With a deep, steadying, breath she pressed the button to open the door to the tiny room. She stepped inside and the helmet built into her suit sprang up from where it was folded away and enveloped her head. With a wiggle and a few smacks she managed to get the hairpins that held her long black hair in the tight bun she had to have it in for the helmet to work in the first place to stop jabbing into her neck. The outer door slid open with a hiss of pneumatics before she was even ready and she couldn't stop the small whimper that escaped her as the staircase that made up the forward landing gear loomed ahead of her.

With another steadying breath she descended the stairs, cautiously stopping half way down to make sure that there weren't any aliens waiting to jump her at the bottom. She thought for a moment about the pistol she kept in a locker behind the pilot's seat and she silently cursed at herself for having forgotten she had it.

She could turn around and go get it...

Rachel shook her head, no, the aliens hadn't shown any signs of waking and it would take forever to de-con, setting up the panels and getting them plugged in wouldn't take long...

She quickly descended the last few stairs and hardly paused when the very soft soles of her environment suit crunched into the dirt and gravel. The night on the planet was as beautiful as anything she'd ever seen and the planet's large moon reflecting off the surface of the harbor almost took her breath away when it caught her eye but with an almost physical effort Rachel tore herself away from the sight and set about setting up the panels.

The solar panels were each contained in a case that would fold out into three sections. So it didn't take too long to lay them out flat and plug the cables into the port that was usually reserved for station power. With that done she could rig up an old plastic crate or something to hold the water and maybe make a gas separator out of- "GAH!"

Rachel flung herself back and away, stumbling over her own feet and falling on her ass. An alien stood only a few feet away looking at her with those big ruby eyes. The lantern in the alien's hand was bright enough to reveal the perplexed look on the creature's face as Rachel sat in the dirt. Rachel and the alien stared at one another, for a moment neither one daring to move. Or maybe that was just Rachel's own interpretation, the alien just looked curious. It was only when she slowly, very slowly, ridiculously slowly, got to her feet that she even noticed the alien was nearly a foot shorter than she was. Rachel was not a tall woman as much as it pained her to admit that, but that being the case the alien was short enough to be what she assumed was a child. The frilly nightgown also seemed to resemble something a child might wear. The little alien's face grew impassive as Rachel stood to her full height.

After another long moment of staring at each other and nothing cataclysmic happening Rachel felt calm enough to try saying something.

"Um... Hello?" She said warily.

The alien child blinked at her before muttering something that could be language... or someone mugging a carp.

"Uh..." Rachel muttered, trying to pick out any meaning from the odd noises.

The child blurted a long string of noises before turning and running back towards one of the houses nearby.

Rachel watched her go with a brick of anxiety settling in her stomach. What would the rest of the town think when that little alien told the rest of the aliens that she got to talk to the weird thing from outer space last night?

With a stomach full of writhing uncertainty Rachel returned to her ship dreading what would happen in the near future.

.XXX.

Day 3

Rachel muttered to herself as she worked on the odd contraption she had created. It mostly consisted of a old plastic crate with an H shaped bit of tube connected to the bottom. With a satisfying click she slid the final hose into place and took a step back to marvel at her masterful display of technical skills. The plastic hose that led from the half of the H shaped tube with the positive electrical terminal fed into a contraption made out of a thick rubber bladder and a check valve. The whole assembly was attached to the booster pump that was used to help cram the literal tons of hydrogen her ship used as fuel into the tanks. Unlike the main pump that would probably suck up the entire contraption and mulch it, the booster pump was made to slowly force the last bit of fuel into a tank that already held tons of gas under tremendous pressure. It should work well enough.

Now all she needed was salt water and there was all the salt water she could ever want right nearby.

Rachel returned to the cockpit and peaked out the window. Life seemed to be continuing at pace for the blue skinned creatures outside. They went about their days like she imagined any late medieval human village would've after some freak tragedy. Many villagers seemed to throw themselves into their work while others visited each other and spent time just sitting and talking.

Watching them almost put her at ease, only the persistent alien nature of them and her fear of it kept her from stepping out and joining them.

A tapping on the canopy glass jerked her attention away from people watching to something far closer. An alien, highly reminiscent of the child she met the night before, right down to the frilly white robe but obviously an adult stood in front of the ship and tapped away at the glass with a stick. When Rachel looked over it held up a basket of those rolls the other aliens had been leaving sporadically. Once the alien was sure she was looking it made a show of setting the basket down very slowly on the pile of stones and day-old rolls.

Rachel sighed, those things really did look delicious.

The robe clad alien backed away slowly making motions with it's hands that Rachel translated as 'Go on, these are for you.'

Rachel turned away from the window with another sigh and started tapping on her tablet, doing calculations based on the estimated output of her little fuel cell. It was really starting to seem like the alien beings outside didn't mean her any harm but was she truly willing to risk it? The dangers could be easily fatal, from any number of problems. She could get sick or make them sick, the plants and animals could be poison to her, and there was still a chance she would somehow insult someone in the village that would end with her death.

Her fingers tapped out the last of the equation she was working on and she stared at the number.

82 years... It would take her little electrolyzer nearly a century to refill the 16 tons of fuel her ship could carry...

The tablet clattered to the floor as it fell from her numb fingers.

.XXX.

Day 4

Rachel looked out over the little village as the sun rose behind her, casting the houses in warm orange light. She stood at the foot of her ship, helmet in place and a plastic barrel at her feet. She could see the aliens just beginning their days, none seeming to have noticed her yet.

There wasn't much point in delaying further. Her hand settled over the pistol strapped to her thigh just to feel the cool surface and remind her it was there. With a kick the barrel was sent rolling into the cobblestone street, it's plastic-y hollow noise drawing the eye of every alien that was already awake. She followed closely behind the barrel and kicked it again sending it bouncing right through the middle of town toward the ocean. She could feel their eyes on her and hear their feet as more and more of them followed behind.

At least none of them interrupted her before she got to the water. With a splash the barrel bounced into the ocean and she followed soon after, stepping off the beach that was off to one side of the much deeper harbor and into the surf. The plastic barrel bobbed on the surface of the water and generally made a pain of itself as she tried to hold it under long enough for the narrow opening to fill it with water. It got easier as water filled it but when it settled to the bottom with a thump she was met with a new problem, it was extremely heavy and difficult to move. With the cap in place to keep the water from spilling out she pulled and pulled till she managed to wrestle it back onto the beach. Exhausted she paused to rest but when she did she was met with the one thing she had been studiously ignoring the entire time.

An army of blue skinned green haired aliens stared at her from only a few feet away.

Her breath caught in her throat as she stared back at them and this seemed to be some kind of signal to the waiting horde. They approached slowly but inexorably, crowding around her. She could feel their hands through her suit, hands that had they been back in civilized space would have a serious lawsuit coming their way.

She very much doubted they meant to be so creepy but they all seemed to want to touch her, alien men and women fascinated with her very existence. Far too frightened to even think she didn't protest as they shepherded her back into town.

She was pulled and pushed and urged all the way to a big building near the center of town. One side of it showed obvious fire damage that had been put out days ago. An alien male stepped out as the commotion surrounding her grew near, he looked older and wore clothes that seemed to be of finer make than the others. He was obviously their leader but what kind? Was he a mayor or some kind of chieftain? Was she going to end up chained to his throne in a skimpy outfit?

She really needed to stop watching old archived Sci Fi movies.

She was brought up to the man, male, alien... Whatever. She was brought to the front of the crowd next to the guy and he smiled at her. He said a bunch of things in that language that sounded like fish being robbed, gesturing and putting his webbed hands on her shoulders. The crowd cheered at certain times and she stood very still with her hands clasped in front of her just trying to act as unobtrusive as possible.

At another gesture from the chief-mayor-leader two familiar figures emerged from the crowd next to her. The pair of females in the white frilly robes stood, smiling and waving at the crowd as the guy talked some more. As she stood she was glad to see that a couple of young males had brought the barrel full of seawater and waved at her when they noticed her looking. She sheepishly waved back and the two looked immensely pleased with themselves.

As the man's speech wound down many of the villagers split off to return to their business and she was surprised by the casual attitude they seemed to have as they chatted among each other. The man turned and said something to the two girls next to her and they both bowed their heads before taking hold of her arms. Rachel looked at them curiously as the man finally finished talking and with another gesture apparently dismissed her.

The two white clad girls escorted her away from the building and back toward her landing sight. The two boys also followed along with the barrel after a brief exchange with the girls. It only took a few minutes to cross the distance and Rachel was happy to finally be back to the safe and familiar Cobra.

The four accompanying her took a step back as they respectfully waited for her to do something. Rachel looked at them and then towards the stairs that led up to her ship. It felt a bit awkward just to leave them and go back inside.

Rachel's eyes fell to the heavy barrel and she dreaded having to drag it up the stairs. That and opening the container inside the ship would contaminate everything. She really didn't have a choice but it was still a concern. She was going to be stuck living on this planet for years at least before she could get enough fuel to make it to another system. Rachel bit her lip as she mulled it over in her mind and after a moment came to a decision.

With a shaking hand she reached up and tapped a button on the sealed collar of her helmet. A specific pattern was needed to manually retract it. She closed her eyes and held her breath as she pressed the final part of the sequence folding her helmet away. She heard the gasp from all four of the aliens that were watching and with a gasp of her own took a deep breath of the native air.

She opened her eyes and looked at her company for the first time without glass in the way. They looked stunned at what she had done and as she took her second breath she wondered if they knew why this was a big deal for her.

"The air, it tastes sweet." Rachel said as she wondered if everything would be ok.

.XXX.

End chapter 1

AN: Well, here's to the start of yet another new idea! Enjoy!